From outside her house in this beaten-down little town in the southern San Joaquin Valley, Nettie Morrison, Allensworth’s unofficial mayor, can look up the road a few hundred yards and see where it all so grandly began – the birthplace of one of the more audacious California dreams.
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There are no palm trees on Myrtle Avenue.
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High up a steep Sierra hillside that rises behind this Mother Lode town, past where the paved road runs out, tucked into a shadowy gulch covered with pines and cedars – and far, far away from the financial calamities rocking Wall Street – this was where Perry Cottingham could be found last week, engaged in that most seminal of California enterprises, mining for gold.
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It’s an axiom of growth, Southern California-style: Suburbs that arise on the far edges of the metropolis in a boom, more often than not, will recede in a bust.
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It is a path as old as California itself.
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It’s not uncommon in farm country to come across old-timers with a passion for preserving the implements of their trade.
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Here is where the straws tap into the common pool of California water, where consequence begins.
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California is laced with fabled roadways: Highway 1, the Golden State, El Camino Real, Route 66 and many others.
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As smoke spread from Castaic to the Mexican border, the numbers
rolled in – air tankers, bulldozers and fire crews deployed, acres
consumed, residents evacuated, houses destroyed, the precise
percentages of containment, the speed of the wind (as opposed to wind
gusts), the number of utility customers without electricity, of
avocado trees lost, of Red Cross shelters opened and the telephone
numbers to reach them.
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